I think its because I know that most Christians when they hear those words believe that today’s dominant expression of church in America should continue to be the default image in our minds when we think “church” .  This expression of the Church is the Sunday morning programmatic model, built around staff, buildings, high-cost infrastructure – with the aims of becoming another “mega”church.  This the picture most people think of when they think of “church” – at least here in the West.

And yes – every part of me is thankful to God that there are tens of thousands of churches built around that expression of God’s family – it is obviously reaching tens of millions of people with the authentic Gospel of God!  Praise God for that!  Lives are changed!

And yet – there are still 250 million people who were not a part of a church gathering last Sunday – and have no connection with a church…many more still may have no true commitment to the Lord Jesus.  And that number is growing all the time.

So a quote stands out to me:

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve already got.” — Genius unknown

Jeff Kirsch, a member of the City on a Hill faith community has a recent, great post on some of the metaphors and assumptions Jesus used to describe what God’s Family looks like – yeast, field, flock, seed, soil… this is a Kingdom, a church that doesn’t need institutional maintenance and a ministry marketing department -

…it is a “subtle contagion”…

…or as in Mark 4:26-29 the farmer (read pastor) sleeps while the Kingdom grows beyond his control!

Why not work with the grain of the Kingdom, rather than against it?

Let the Gospel seed grow underground in your friendships, permeating every nook and cranny of your life – truly trust that the fire of mission and divine love will bubble up in people as you share life on life with them.

Trust that Jesus truly is the head of the Church – and not you and your staff.  Could it be that our churches look too much alike – each vying for the same 15% of the population – meanwhile hundreds of millions more are looking desperately for a church that looks like Jesus-with-skin-on in their context, only to find the same praise band or Powerpoints wherever they go.

I’m writing this not out of anger or bitterness; I’m writing this as a missionary, crying desperately for the Christians to reach out to a lost world.  Could it be that the biggest obstacle for people in discovering the true Lord Jesus and his Church is our pre-conceived notions of what church is and how it should function in the world?

The lost need us to recapture the characteristics of the Kingdom of God and to tear down the walls of the church-box in our mind.  The desperate are dying for us to incarnate the Gospel in fresh ways on our block – even as we love and bless what God is doing down the street.

I am cautiously optimistic though, as I look at the horizon of “church planting” – the wineskin of the church is becoming fresh, new. Churches gathering in nightclubs, poetry circles, homes, parks, under overpasses and in city centers.  Churches that live together 24/7, that function as a little family and a source of light and healing for their blighted neighborhood.  I’m seeing new forms of God’s family take shape in our little organic church network.  I’m seeing new faith-community experiments bubble up all over Chicago, and the country.

Its time to take the lid off – where might things spread if we took Jesus’ images of his Church seriously?

Its BOTH/AND.

Recently there’s been some discussion about the growth of the house church movement worldwide, and how seemingly unnoticed it all is to most of us.  Its hard to notice something that’s underground.  Tall Skinny Kiwi wrote a reflection article that Wolfgang Simpson recently published on the topic of the unnoticeable movement of house churches around the world that is rapidly growing out of control.  TSK wrote 7 reasons why you aren’t seeing the house church movement as overtly as other world-wide movements:

1 Off-the-grid house churches that intentionally do not want to be known, listed or be on anybody’s radar. We find out about them by accident or through opinion polling or sampling, the kind of research George Barna does.

These OoCC (out of Church Christians) gatherings contain a lot of the God-yes-church-no crowd out there.

2 Business groups, either house churches within a company or those connecting folks in the business world. This number is huge but hard to track as many business folks believe it’s nobodies business whether they hang out with witches, freemasons or create or join their by invitations-only organic churches for support.

3 More and more traditional churches are changing their home groups or even transitioning their whole lot into house churches; some, in order to avoid misunderstanding and tension, intentionally misname their emerging or fully functioning house churches as “home groups” or even “cells.”

4 Inside the Roman Catholic culture (I said culture, not church) there is a surprisingly large amount of “small, little churches” that are intentionally set up to cut out the middle layer of clergy and directly connect the people with Jesus & the Bible. Behind this are some born again bishops and cardinals; actually, it goes right up to the top. Again, this development is far larger than most think. But only because it happens in an un-protestant environment does not invalidate it.

5 It is not only the Anglican Church that develops “small missional communities”, but many more denominations do that. Amongst them big ones like the Assemblies of God in certain areas of the world.

6 Insider movements. A staggering amount of under-the-radar-house churches are emerging within religious megablocks, the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, the New Agers and even within certain cults. But they choose to stay within their religious culture for effectiveness and to build bridges of God. One of my friends is a former Hindu priest, fully painted up and in his safran dress, who now very effectively plants house churches amongst Brahmins in India. If “proper” Christians would meet him, they’d probably shower him with tracts…

7 There is a seventh version of hc’s out there that I do not bring up here intentionally because it kind of messes with the idea of a sixpack. It would be media-birthed house churches, initiated by TV, radio or folks like a friend of mine who became a guru and coach in a (huge!) online gamer community… So for sixpack reasons I would not mention it, but this actually might have the potential to become the biggest initiative of all: a facebookable, twitterable digital spawning of hc’s that emerge – but not stay – on the web.

What are your thoughts on these reasons?  Are they accurate?  Are they inflated?

Will this happen?  Who knows for sure.  I do know that at some level, Evangelicals deserve it.  Though I don’t primarily identify myself as an Evangelical (especially in the popular sense of the word) there is a lot about the movement I agree with (the gospel is something to be shared, Bible is central to understanding our faith, etc).  And yet I can’t help but say this coming collapse is “deserved.”

Evangelicals have squandered their massive influence on America, with refusing to creatively engage the culture and instead creating a Christian sub-culture (with radio stations, bookstores and the like) and when Christians DO engage their surrounding world, its sort of reminds me of little the little kid that would throw a snowball at a passing car, only to return to his little group of cronies to talk about brave he was.

Pickets for “pro-life” and anti-gay marriage protests are not going to bring the Kingdom of God.  This sort of change in culture is not what Jesus wanted, or he would have been a politician.  Instead, he was a storyteller, an actor, a healer, a teacher, and a revolutionary.  I don’t think he’d join a cause, he WAS a cause, him and his followers.

In Acts 5:13, Luke says, “But no one else dared to join them, even though all the people had high regard for them.” What’s up with that?  Almost like everyone appreciated the progress in society these early Christians were fighting/dying for, but few people had the guts to join ranks with them.  Isn’t this the opposite of today?

For those reading this and are not Christians, I’m sorry for the way we as Christians have misrepresented Christ.  I’m sorry for how I’ve misrepresented him. For those who are followers, let’s really get out there and FOLLOW!  I want to move beyond argumentative Christianity, and then I want to move past cynicism and despair, and live in the adventure of the Christ-movement in North America!